The Problem: The customer required a Blade Balance Stand capable of dynamically balancing a wide variety of helicopter blades in difficult environmental conditions.

The RedViking Solution: RedViking designed and built a unique whirl tower / blade balance stand to handle helicopter rotor blades from multiple OEMs. An enclosure was designed to improve and maintain testing capability in a desert environment.

Whirl Tower Increases Productivity and Efficiency

One of the world’s largest helicopter companies came to us with a challenge – design and build a new kind of blade balance stand. It needed to handle blades from multiple manufacturers, have greater availability in the challenging environment of its desert location, and improve overall productivity.

Custom Whirl Tower Enclosure for Desert Environment

As specialists in flexible systems design, we developed an extensive range of rotary balancing capabilities to handle current and future requirements. The RedViking Blade Balance Stand is also designed to monitor operational conditions of the gearbox tower structure, which isolates the gearbox from potentially harmful loads to significantly improve test stand gearbox life. A weatherproof, air conditioned enclosure allows the whirl tower to operate in difficult testing environments under which most systems would not function.

Dual Helicopter Blade Lift Design Improves Productivity

The stand includes a dual blade lift device, allowing a blade to be unloaded and a new blade loaded in a single operation, reducing changeover time and improving productivity. The stand includes a Rotor Head specifically designed for dynamic blade balancing.

Torque Measurement and Blade History Tracking

An optional RedViking Whirl Tower component, Error Proofing, can be provided through an instrumented torque gun in order to provide reliable, historical data for bolt torques. Together with our fully integrated control system, this provides the ability for advanced data analysis and tracking.

The RedViking Blade Balance Stand saves time and money, improves productivity and provides better data analysis than has previously been possible.